Elizabeth Montalbano

Sun Microsystems Inc. has created a new office to coordinate its open-source projects and appointed long-time technology evangelist Simon Phipps to oversee the effort. Phipps' new role as chief open source officer will be a familiar one, since he's been performing the duties of the job for about two years at Sun, Phipps said in an interview.

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) is now reselling support services for MySQL AB's open-source database, an HP spokeswoman has confirmed. Under the terms of the deal, HP is selling MySQL Network directly to their customers.

A well-known Microsoft Corp. Web logger downplayed the proposed use of a new name for RSS (Really Simple Syndication) in the next version of Internet Explorer (IE) following several days of intense discussion about the notion of rebranding RSS in the Web log community.

It's been 10 years since the initial public offering (IPO) of ill-fated Internet pioneer Netscape Communications Corp., and the often-told story of its rise and fall has inspired inevitable comparisons to the industry's current darling, Google Inc. Like Netscape, Google had a wildly successful IPO, created a mainstream technology for optimizing Internet use and, as a result, has Microsoft Corp. gunning for them in the same way it went for Netscape's jugular.

IBM Corp. plans to offer support services for the Apache Software Foundation's Geronimo open-source Java application server starting Sept. 15, the company will announce on Tuesday at the Linuxworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco.

Microsoft Corp. said it is stepping up efforts to replace Linux with Windows, highlighting a new campaign aimed at specific kinds of server workloads. Speaking at the company's annual financial analyst meeting on Thursday, Kevin Johnson, a Microsoft group vice president, said the software giant is focused on offering specific products and services aimed at three types of workloads where Linux is now a common choice: Web servers, high-performance computing and edge servers.

For those rabid, open-source conspiracy theorists still holding on to the popular notion that Microsoft Corp. is secretly working on its own version of the Linux operating system (OS), Bill Hilf has some sobering news. "The bottom line is, we're wholly, 100 percent committed to Windows and think we can do amazingly powerful things in the operating system," said Hilf, director of platform technology strategy at the Redmond, Washington-based software giant.

Microsoft Corp. is expected to go live with a program requiring customers to validate that they are running legitimate copies of Windows before they can use Microsoft's download services. The Windows Genuine Advantage 1.0 program ensures that customers using Windows Update, Microsoft Update for Windows and the Microsoft Download Center run a program that checks that their Windows operating system (OS) is genuine before they can download updates or new content from those services.